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Unit 7: John Locke

apparent. To be a champion of individual freedom and extension of democracy before the Notes
inauguration of the age of democracy was no small achievement, and in achieving this,
Locke immortalized himself.
• Locke’s political theory addressed four problems: (a) the nature of political power at a time
when the nation states were consolidating their status; (b) a proper relationship between
religion and politics, and between the Church and the state; (c) actual practice of governing
in the early mercantile period; and (d) types of knowledge appropriate to religious and
political theory. Locke’s theory represented a fundamental shift in intellectual and political
consciousness, deflecting subjects from the notions of duty and obedience vis-a-vis their
rulers, towards rights and the idea that a government was entitled to their affection and
loyalty only if it could successfully provide defined services. He established the dignity of
the individual by making a case for both natural and political equality, for God would never
accept absolutism— political and parental—as that would imply abdication of one’s duty
towards self-preservation and freedom. His views on toleration shaped the liberal theory,
emphasizing the need to separate religion from the political, the importance of belief, and
the injustice in persecution and intolerance.
• One of the most important perceptions of America was that it was a nation of Lockeian
individualism. Locke was often described as America’s philosopher-king. His influence was
so pervasive that it was seen as a self-evident truth. Louis Hartz’s influential work The Liberal
Tradition in America (1955) endorsed this view. However, this predominant view has been
questioned by some recent revisionist scholars like Bailyn, Pocock and Gordon Wood, who
emphasized a more communitarian origin of American political tradition. One such crucial
influence was the civic republican traditions of ancient Greece and Rome and sixteenth-
century Florence, manifested in the preservation of virtue and public involvement in civic
affairs. But it is generally agreed that such a view was a distortion of Locke’s views. It was
also a caricature of Locke, portraying him as a possessive individualist. Locke was not for
merely maximizing interest. His emphasis was more on human virtues and excellence. His
concerns, significant in themselves, were justice, courage, self-sacrifice, humanity, industry
and truthfulness, qualities of human character appropriate for a new liberal order. He
• constructs modem moral virtues, including civility, liberality, justice and humanity, on the
basis of his egoistic and hedonistic psychology .... To understand this view of human life as
an entirely degraded one, bereft of any dignity, is to do an injustice not only to Locke but to
liberalism and ourselves (Tarcov 1984: 210).
• Locke was the product at the turning point of English history. The Newtonian revolution in
science convinced him of the need for a new philosophy. The intellectual temper of England
allowed complete independence in the realm of philosophical speculation. Locke did not
make a secret of his debt to Descartes, and with his genius grasped the spirit of this new age.
He became the philosopher of this new age.
• If we list out the items that constitute the liberal world-view: individualism, freedom,
consensual limited government, minimal state, constitutional authority, the rule of law, the
majority rule principle, separation of powers, sovereignty of the people, representative
democracy, property rights, civil society, pluralism, tolerance and the right to judge authority,
then Locke is the founding father of liberal political theory. Subsequent liberal theorists have
worked within the framework that Locke provided. The ideological triumph of liberalism in
the twentieth century over its rivals, Communism and Fascism, prove that the Lockeian
insights developed in the context of late seventeenth-century England proved to be the most
enduring and satisfying framework among all the competing political ideologies of the last
four hundred years.

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